Your eyes on California Government

Editor’s Note: This story is the second in a three-part series on San Diego’s battle for pension reform. The first is here.

OCT. 12, 2011

By JOHN HRABE

The Vons store in the retirement community of Rancho Bernardo isn’t the first place you’d expect to be a hotbed of criminal activity. But at 10:03 a.m. on Sept. 10, San Diego police responded to a call from a store manager worried there might be trouble in front of the store.

Neither the potential combatants nor the responding police officers shared the store manager’s concerns. The officers even nonchalantly greeted one of the troublemakers by his first name, Carl. Everyone but the manager considered this incident to be normal, just a routine weekend showdown between petition circulators and union blockers.

Summer of Rage in San Diego

On Sept. 30, the city of San Diego reached a temporary ceasefire in the ground hostilities between petition circulators and organized labor. Throughout the past six months, as signature gatherers tried to qualify the Comprehensive Pension Reform measure for the June 2012 ballot, they encountered unprecedented opposition from labor-backed organizations.

These self-interested opponents of pension reform spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on misleading advertisements and dispatched teams of counter-protesters to block, bracket and shadow signature gatherers. They also distributed mailers to encourage voters who’d already signed the measure to withdraw their support. In September, the San Diego Union Tribune observed, “There has likely never been a more aggressive and contested petition drive in San Diego history.”

The real story behind San Diego’s pension reform effort isn’t what they’ve put on the ballot, it’s how they managed to do it.

“The San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, working with statewide unions, mounted a signature-blocking effort that was unprecedented in its scope and ferocity,” explained T.J. Zane, chairman of the Comprehensive Pension Reform for San Diego campaign, who also serves as president and CEO of the Lincoln Club of San Diego County. “Overcoming the labor cartel’s campaign of intimidation was not easy but we eventually figured out successful tactics that enabled us to gather, what we believe will be, a sufficient number of signatures.”

Thick Skin and Comfortable Shoes

Signature gathering is challenging under normal circumstances. Proponents must adhere to the strict specifications of California’s election code, which details a petition’s format, font size, binding and paper color. Any deviations from these requirements — a missing date, a loose staple — can disqualify a batch of otherwise valid signatures. In 2009, an attempted recall of a tax-hiking Republican legislator stumbled out of the gate when, according to one conservative blogger, campaign supporters mistakenly printed petitions on the wrong size paper.

“Your petition has to be about an issue that is framed to catch someone’s attention, like a good TV ad has that ‘sit up and look’ quality,” said Tim Rosales, vice-president of the Wayne Johnson Agency, a Sacramento-based firm that has run numerous successful statewide and local ballot measure campaigns. “Like with any communication platform, you have a very short amount of time to engage someone, hold their attention and affect some positive action on their part.”

After signed petitions have been submitted to the registrar of voters for signature verification, a host of other problems can invalidate a petition. In the past eighteen months, two San Diego charter amendment campaigns have watched their massive signature totals evaporate during the verification stage, primarily because of invalid or duplicate signatures. 

4’ 11’’ of Union Muscle

Last month I spent the day with San Diego Councilman Carl DeMaio as he gathered signatures for the city’s Comprehensive Pension Reform measure and witnessed a small sample of the abnormal obstacles confronting circulators. The most common counter-measure, “blocking,” comes in varying degrees.

Jasmine Johnson and Samantha Tuey, two Grossmont College students responsible for the last blocking shift of the day, demonstrated blocking’s most tame and defensible form. Arguably, it shouldn’t be considered blocking; the two volunteers just stood across from petition circulators with a printed sign.

“Do you know what you are signing?” it read.

When I asked Johnson to respond to accusations that she was intimidating potential signers, she laughed, “I’m 4’11″, not too intimidating! Look at me, we’re just here standing and smiling.”

Johnson added that she just wanted to make sure people were informed about the measure because, she believed, it would result in a loss of stability for the middle class. And despite their political disagreements, Tuey volunteered to take a picture of the pension-reform volunteers that wanted to commemorate their day.

The Many Levels of Blocking

If all blocking were like Johnson and Tuey’s, it wouldn’t be controversial or effective. The next level of blocking could best be characterized as an attempt to distract or annoy signature gatherers. It’s anything that will slow down the signature process, discourage a petition circulator or deter a registered voter from signing the petition. These blockers also might try to bait circulators into making a mistake on camera.

“It is already pretty tough these days to get a voter to sign your petition when you are at a shopping center, or at the mall,” pointed out Jon Fleischman, founder and publisher of FlashReport.org. “It becomes incredibly difficult when you have someone yelling and jeering at potential signers — it just frightens them away.”

At the start of my day in San Diego, this mid-level of blocking came in the form of counter-protesters with misleading signs, “Identity Stolen Here.” By the early afternoon, a few city employees had engaged in heated arguments with circulators, making it difficult for them to collect signatures. Union advertisements on Craigslist offered jobs to “aggressive” applicants, who ostensibly would be willing to engage in more direct and confrontational exchanges.

In June, private investigators hired by the Lincoln Club of San Diego recorded several of the most egregious incidents of blocking at shopping centers. These cases involve either a direct physical confrontation, or a level of shouting and yelling in such close proximity that all signature gathering is impossible. Several local news stations have reported on these intimidation tactics by “union goon squads.”

Campaign of Intimidation

Blocking on the ground may have earned the most media attention. But the opening salvos in labor’s broader campaign to obstruct signature gathering were misleading advertisements that impugned petition circulating not just for conservative causes, but for all political ideologies.

“Californians Against Identity Theft,” a non-profit group funded by the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, blitzed San Diego airwaves with the message that circulators could be “convicted felons and forgers” looking to use petitions as an “identity theft starter kit.” If you review the group’s website, you’ll find information from such privacy experts as Ancestor.com and the “Leary Leaks” blog.

Several of the country’s most well-respected privacy protection organizations issued public statements refuting the ad’s claims. Beth Givens is director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nationally renowned, non-profit consumer advocacy group and one of the groups that publicly denounced the ad campaign. She repeatedly stressed that her organization has taken no position on the pension issue. Her organization educates the public on identity theft and privacy rights and believed it was important to clarify the public record.

“Signing petitions does not put one at risk for identity theft,” Givens wrote  in a recent email. “The key data elements that are used by identity thieves are Social Security numbers — for new account fraud — and financial account numbers — for existing account fraud — not one’s name and address. Exploiting people’s fear of identity theft to thwart signature collection is reprehensible. It’s political trickery of the worst kind.”

DeMaio’s “Signature Storms”

Ironically, the identity theft fear-mongering may have had the unintended consequence of strengthening labor’s worst enemy, City Councilman Carl DeMaio, who also is running for mayor in San Diego. When DeMaio and his team began to see a drop-off in the number of signatures collected as a result of the blocking and misinformation, they developed a new tactic, “signature storms.”

The best way to describe these signature storms is petition circulating on steroids. Professional signature gatherers identify high-traffic locations in untapped precincts to maximize their time. Signature storms go further and implement the intense campaigning usually seen once a measure is on the ballot.

The campaign mailed invitations to registered voters in the neighborhoods surrounding their shopping center. The invite had a specific date they could sign Carl’s petition. The mailer was followed up with an automated phone call on the day of the signature storm to remind residents that he’d be in the neighborhood all day. The whole process was repeated two or three times per precinct.

During my Saturday with DeMaio in Rancho Bernardo, countless signers referenced the mailer or the phone call as the reason they’d turned out to the Vons. Some people never set foot inside the store; they came out just to sign the petition or see Carl. Instead of circulators having to pitch every passerby on the measure, and then explain the pension issue, the roles had been reversed. Voters sought out the circulator.

“I got the phone call that Carl DeMaio’s down at the Vons,” said Marie Thayer, a Rancho Bernardo retiree who dragged her husband out to sign the pension measure. “I don’t sign petitions because they’re getting paid a buck a signature, but if he’s here, I know it’s legit.”

One couple, who are residents of a nearby retirement community, Casa de Las Campanas, specifically cited identity theft concerns as the reason they came out to sign Carl’s petition. They were so rattled by the fears of identity theft that they refused to share their names. However, they “trusted Carl” with their information and signature. He’d previously met them at a Wednesday night dinner at “the Casa.” (It was prime rib night.)

While signature storms worked for a while, over the course of the campaign there was some indication that their effectiveness also declined. Even at a signature storm, blockers had an opportunity to cause trouble.

Decision to Go Door-to-Door

The single biggest tactical shift, according to Zane, occurred after Labor Day, when the campaign decided to minimize the retail-based signature gathering to avoid the blocking completely. Their solution: the unprecedented step of sending circulators to go door-to-door. The campaign paid a premium bounty for signatures collected via precinct walks, $7 per signature, but ended up walking “every walkable neighborhood in the city.”

“There’s no question going door-to-door made the difference,” Zane said. “We’d see our numbers spike anytime we did a signature walk.”

This combination of campaign tactics and their ability to adapt to union countermeasures helped pension reformers reach the sufficient number of signatures. Their definition of sufficient might be considered excessive to most veteran campaign consultants in the signature gathering business. Proponents needed to collect 94,346 valid signatures, or 15 percent of the city’s registered voters. On September 30, they turned in 145,027 signatures to the Registrar of Voters.

To understand what that number means in non-political terms, on any given Sunday, you’ll find 63,984 football fans packed into Qualcomm Stadium to watch the San Diego Chargers. You could fill Qualcomm twice and still be left with enough people for a respectable crowd at Petco Park. Not that anyone would voluntarily go to a Padres game.

(The following YouTube videos show the intimidation of the petition workers.)

Tags: Carl DeMaio, elections, Flashreport.org, Grossmont College, John Hrabe, Jon Fleischman, San Diego, unions